morphology

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of organisms without consideration of function.
2. n. The form and structure of an organism or one of its parts: the morphology of a cell; the morphology of vertebrates.
3. n. Linguistics The study of the structure and form of words in language or a language, including inflection, derivation, and the formation of compounds.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The science of organic form; the science of the outer form and internal structure (without regard to the functions) of animals and plants; that department of knowledge which treats both of the ideal types or plans of structure, and of their actual development or expression in living organisms. It has the same scope and application in organic nature that crystallology has in the inorganic.
2. n. The science of structure, or of forms, in language. It is that division of the study of language which deals with the origin and function of inflections and derivational forms, or of the more formal as distinguished from the more material part of speech.
3. n. In physical geography, the study of the form of lands.
4. n. Structural psychology (which see).

Wiktionary

1. n. uncountable A scientific study of form and structure, usually without regard to function. Especially:
2. n. countable The form and structure of something.
3. n. countable A description of the form and structure of something.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. (Biol.) That branch of biology which deals with the structure of animals and plants, treating of the forms of organs and describing their varieties, homologies, and metamorphoses. See tectology, and promorphology.
2. n. (Biol.) The form and structure of an organism.
3. n. (Linguistics) The branch of linguistics which studies the patterns by which words are formed from other words, including inflection, compounding, and derivation.
4. n. The study of the patterns of inflection of words or word classes in any given language; the study of the patterns in which morphemes combine to form words, and the rules for combination; morphemics; ; also, the inflection patterns themselves.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. the branch of geology that studies the characteristics and configuration and evolution of rocks and land forms
2. n. the admissible arrangement of sounds in words
3. n. the branch of biology that deals with the structure of animals and plants
4. n. studies of the rules for forming admissible words